Why does stopping MEV still require trusting a committee not to peek?
Opportunity
Every production encrypted mempool protects pending transactions behind a threshold decryption committee. If enough members collude they can reconstruct keys and front-run the same transactions the protocol was built to hide. Unlike a consensus fork, early decryption by a corrupt committee leaves no on-chain evidence and cannot be slashed or even detected. A 2026 SoK paper systematising the entire field confirms this trust assumption persists across every deployed scheme. The only published alternative, DecryptChain, replaces the committee with proof-of-work, but introduces new latency tradeoffs and has not shipped on any production chain.
Why it matters
Until mempool encryption eliminates the trusted committee entirely, encrypted mempools shift MEV from open searchers to whoever controls the keys, which is a smaller and harder-to-audit set of actors.
How I score the opportunity
The Opportunity Score is my own read, not a measurement: how much it hurts, how often it bites, and how little exists to solve it today. Higher means I think it is more worth building.
How much pain it causes when it shows up.
How often people actually run into it.
How little good tooling exists for it today.
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